Ch. 1 Lavender Shingle: Moving 1965

Ch. 1. Moving

1965

 In late September, in a delirious cloud of sizzling heat, the magenta sky swept by, and a hot desert breeze, redolent of sage, blew through the window, I was a twenty-one-year old bride. I wasn’t starry-eyed, but cat-eyed, like a panther crouched on a limb ready to pounce on a gazelle.

Utah furled far behind me on Interstate 5 like the narrow tail of a kite in a fortuitous wind.  Goodbye to Utah, land of Zion and the Mormon faith in which I grew up, home of my crazy, carbon-dioxided, smothering mother and, farther away, my once-loving, once Utah-settled, but now Alabama-flown father.  My siblings, like fellow prisoners too feeble to make the escape, stayed locked in my latest and last Salt Lake City home and, like the escapee who bounds across the open fields toward the sheltering forest, I could not afford to think of how I had left them behind. I sped across the desert. In pursuit. 

The Wasatch Mountains, to which I would come back thirty years later, and about which I would write my first book—Salvation – A Judge’s Memoir of a Mormon Childhoo—now funneled my exit from the beautiful Salt Lake Valley, a land in which I had been birthed and raised from pioneer stock.

The Karmann Ghia was metallic —baby blue, a sun sparkle of a car I had purchased with money from my night shift job at Western Airlines.  Winslow and I I had packed this thimble of a car full of everything I owned and now, newly husband-and-wife, were humming through the pungent autumn pine and brush of eastern Oregon to a fir and cedar-wooded resort called Fiddlers Green, overlooking the McKenzie River, where we would get happily drunk on bad sherry, run naked on an isolated hilltop overlooking the river, and welcome our new life with arms open to the sky.

How I had longed to escape Salt Lake City, my sullen mother and my sullied childhood, the claustrophobic house, and my still suffering siblings moving stealthily through the unpredictable weather of home, waiting for a chance to leap away. I longed to leave with that fierce longing that comes from years of wanting and the sudden realization that there is a window of opportunity.

I had stumbled in a daze through my first year of the University of Utah in 1963, pummeled by my failure to raise the money to go to New York and become an actress, or to go to Northwestern University in Illinois  to take advantage of the drama scholarship I have been awarded.

It wasn’t just the money that stopped me—also fear. Some children reach eighteen mature and wise in the ways of the world, but I arrived naïve and incapable, not knowing how to negotiate, not having been trained by my abusive and neglectful parents, nor by my maternal grandmother, Ninyah, whose unrealized dream for my mother became her dream for me—to be a good Mormon wife and mother who might work in the church offices as a secretary, but who would be better off to marry a rich Mormon man.

“Actress? Dear me, no, ” she tut-tutted. “That’s not a ladylike profession, dear.”

I was lost then, as if wandering in one of the burgeoning suburbs of the city, roads winding akimbo, ending up on themselves, in circles, cul-de-sacs, or dead ends. It was there, on those strange, unmanageable roads, that I discovered beer and boys and sex and sororities lurking, and abandoned the structured, platted roads of academics to wander wild in the streets.

I drank at night, usually Jack Daniels, Coors, or Screwdrivers, and in the mornings, to clear my head,  Bloody Marys, made with a bottle of Mr. &  Mrs. T. and a stick of celery I kept cold and veined in the fridge, alongside my only other food – fish sticks and V8.

I drove madly in cars I purchased with money from my after school and night jobs—first, a rattling old 1953 Ford stick shift in which the wipers would only work when I pressed on the gas pedal, then in a spanky 1960 Fiat my great-aunt let me use, until tearing around a corner I lost a hubcap and punctured the tire, driving on the wheel rim until sparks flew up through the window.

I lost my “real” (as I saw it) virginity when I slept with Snappy Gordon, the top debater and bottom catch at the university, a fraternity man who smooth-talked me down a rose-strewn path at Saltair Resort, rolled me over to my delight on the beach, and then accused me of having already popped my cherry because I didn’t bleed. For that adventure, I got sand in my pants and a rash from the rough rub.  

Are we all lost like that at some point in out youths?  Is there something genetic, hormonal, and cruelly unavoidable in being a young human?

In November, on my way to the Pi Phi house, a blast came on the radio “We interrupt this program …” I turned it off, irritated at the break in my favorite song.  At the sorority house,  I huddled with my  sisters to  watch coverage of the Kennedy’ assassination and later, the funeral, rapt and saddened. Somehow chastened by the enormity of death and the destruction of hope.

“We don’t know when we will die.” Helen had said, watching the cortege. We still don’t, I think now at age 72, my friends dying, so much political disappointment and personal sorrow behind me. 

By spring of 1964, I was “pinned” to Snappy, now a graduating ROTC senior, assigned to a post in Germany, from where he proposed at Christmas, and then abandoned me in March.  I got drunk at the Red Belle most t evenings thereafter, carousing and lost myself in the miasmic bar scene. I was notified in May that I had flunked out of college.

During my brief stint in college, I worked the midnight to eight shift at Western Airlines, plotting trips for the night owls who called and dreamed. But now, free during the day, I went back to my old job at The House of Music where I had worked from the time I was  sixteen until day classes at the U prevented regular hours. Once again, I was the “record girl, choosing and stocking the store with standards and projected hits.

One day, not long after I had been jilted by Snappy, a handsome fellow walked in and browsed through the classical albums. He was leaving when I, reluctant to ever let a customer leave empty-handed, caught him at the door and said, “You didn’t find what you were looking for?”

“No,” he said, turning and smiling a flash of light, “you don’t have what I’m looking for.”

            “I’m sure we do,” I flirted.

            “Really?” he challenged. “I’m looking for Bach at Zwolle and you don’t have it.”

            Smugly, “It’s Bach at Zwolfe,” I said, “And we do have it.”

            “Really? I don’t think so.”

            I led him back to the classical section. Rather than filing the album under Bach, I had filed it under organ music. I pulled it from the rack and handed it to him, grinning. “See?”

            “Ah,” he said, “Yes, you have it. But it’s Back at Zwolle, as I said.”

            I looked, surprised. He was correct.

            “Well, then,” I said, “I guess we’re both right.”

            “Indeed,” he said, “You do have what I want.”

            In short, I did. Or so we thought at the time. He was a college dropout, a “ski bum,” traveling from ski resort to ski resort, getting jobs as a ski repairman, an optical company delivery boy, a short order cook, to support his travel and skiing. He was in Salt Lake, to ski the upcoming season at Alta, Brighton, and Park City.

“How about lunch?” he had smiled.

“Well, sure. I’m Kathi, by the way.”

“And I’m Winslow,” he shook my hand. “But my friends call me Wink.”

Wink? This was a man with the courage to be called “Wink.” How could I go wrong?

We skied, listened to Brubeck, danced to the orchestra at Lagoon, cheered Peter, Paul and Mary at the Rainbow, ate at The Hofbrau, and engaged in long conversations about Viet Nam, Kennedy’s death, politics, and economics. I saw him as exotic, learned, and passionate. He met my discombobulated family and seemed not to hold them against me. They liked him. We made love in a haze and a hurry.  By June we were engaged and living together  By September, married.

But even before June, I had raced from my house to his apartment, desperate to find somewhere else to lay my head.  Any place but home.  And now, I was free to move.